New discoveries

How do you weigh a black hole? For a person, it’s easy. You just step upon a scale and read off your weight. But no scale is largeenough to carry a black hole! Even if it were, it would be gobbled up by the black hole’s incrediblegravitational pull in...

Imagine that you’re on an open field in the middle of the night. In the distance is the edge of a darkforest. Using your binoculars, you see dozens of fireflies buzzing around between the trees. Great,that tells you what kind of animals live out there, right? But then you...

The basic building blocks for life may already have been around when the universe was still young.  Living things consist of organic molecules. Organic molecules consist of various atoms, like hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen. From these atoms, you can build all kinds of organic molecules: simple ones with...

ALMA has discovered that young baby galaxies were already very well-behaved. The discovery is a big surprise to astronomers. Everyone believed that newborn galaxies would be very chaotic, with gas moving around in every possible direction. Instead, ALMA found two baby galaxies that already rotated like our own mature...

If you’ve just created your own little school garden, you don’t expect to find a large tree growing there within a week. Likewise, astronomers didn’t expect large galaxies to exist already at a time when the Universe was very young. Still, that’s exactly what they found, using the large...

If you want to build a house of cards, you’d better not try it outside during a hurricane. Likewise, you would expect that it is hard for new stars to form in a violent environment. Still, ALMA has found eleven small baby stars extremely close to the huge black...

Every now and then, galaxies in the universe crash into each other. Some of those cosmic traffic accidents have been studied in much detail by telescopes on the ground and in space. Most of them are tens or hundreds of millions of light-years away.  Now, ALMA has seen a...

Suppose there are eight trees in the street you live in. They’re all the same kind of tree, and they’re also the same size. Surely you would expect them to host the same types of insects, right? But what if some of the trees carry just a small number...

Our planet Earth orbits the Sun. And it’s not alone. Our solar system contains eight planets, many dozens of moons, and countless asteroids, icy ‘dwarf planets’ and comets. Other stars also have planets. Astronomers have already discovered thousands of them. Even the nearest star has its own planet. New...

Before cameras and photography existed, you would never know how you looked just after you were born. The only way would be to go to a nursery, take a close look at newborn babies, and assume that you started out more or less the same. Astronomers face a similar...

Do you recognize this image? If you are a regular visitor of the ALMA website, you may have seen similar photos before. Yes, this is a protoplanetary disk – a flat, rotating disk of gas and dust around a newborn star. In the future, particles in the disk will...

Have you ever played with a magnet? It’s like magic. A magnet has an invisible force field. You can only see it indirectly. For instance by sprinkling iron filings on a piece of cardboard, and putting the magnet beneath the cardboard. Magnetic fields not only show up in the...